Techniques are provided for automatically deploying software packages.
Management agents represent these packages, a logical tree represents the
deployed structure, and a node of the tree represents a management agent.
A node that does not have any child node is referred to as a leaf node. A
recursive process associated with at least one repository generates the
structure. The repositories include information for configuring the nodes
and thus control the deployment process. During deployment, a non-leaf
node, referred to as an initiator node, uses information received from a
corresponding repository to generate its child nodes. A child node, if
being an initiator node, recursively generates its child nodes until the
recursive process stops as there is no additional child node to be
generated. Further, node identifiers are automatically established and
assigned to respective nodes. Those identifiers are used by software
instances such as management agents represented by nodes to communicate
with other software instances such as repositories or directories for
registering information about nodes, looking up information about other
nodes, etc.